The quality of American public education took a nosedie in the 1960s and 1970s, when the flower-children mentality began to infiltrate the curriculum at teachers colleges and education departments of universities.
The educational "reforms" of that period are reflected in today's politically correct public elementary and secondary education, with its emphasis on equal outcomes, self-esteem, and dumbing down of academic standards for teachers and students. Even worse, in the name of self-esteem, for example, many schools teach outright fasehoods, claiming that the Ancient Egyptians were black and assigning them the ultimate origins of Western civilization, "stolen" from them.
Equal opportunity was the goal of public education before the 1960s. The mission was to educate Americas's youth up to their intellectual potential, recognizing that children are no more equal intellectually than they are physically. Public schools also sought to prepare students to participate as citizens in a free democratic society.
Students capable of absorbing higher education went to college, if their parents could afford it, many to study for careers in the nation's businesses, institutions, and professions. Competency in basic academic skills was required for a bachelor's degree and authorization to teach in public schools.
Somewhere along the line, the quality of teacher education got bushwhacked. Today, many future teachers use their college years, not to accumulate knowledge and an understanding of the world's heritage, but to meet state requirements in "teaching theory," "conflict resolution," and subjects that celebrate ethnic diversity and multiculturalism and focus on methods for building and maintaining student self-esteem, especially in failing students. By and large, this educational experience is not producing literate teachers, as attested to by the large numbers who fail competency tests of acacademic skills, even in subjects they intend to teach.
Politically correct agendas are responsible for diluting the academic curriculum for future teachers, and the subsequent dumbing down of student education, tragically for our most academically gifted students. Increasingly, teachres with graduate degrees in education can't teach; they don't know any subjects well enough to do so. To teach children to read or write or manipulate numbers, you have to have some command of the process of reading, writing, and calculation yourself--not the case for far too many current and future teachers. Things won't change in public schools until we stop compromising teacher training by watering down core academic requirements. Especially pernicious is the "whole language" or "whole word" method of teaching reading. It doesn't work. Only phonics works.
This is not a blanket criticism of teacher training or of teachers. There are good teachers colleges, just as there are many well-educated teachers who inspire the best academically from students. But the reformers of the 1960s and 1970s, who dismantled the public school system that had worked successfully in America for many years, precipitated the decline in both teacher quality and student performance we are facing today, particularly in our troubled urban public schools.
A state teaching certificate is, unfortunately, no guarantee of an educated teacher. Required courses in theory and methods, while of limited value, have almost nothing to do with education in the core academic disciplines of English, literature, the arts, history, science, and mathematics. The proof is in the large numbers of teachers failing basic competency tests.
After thirty years of destroying the hopes and dreams of most American students whose parents couldn't afford private schools for them, or couldn't move to neighborhoods with better schools and teachers, several states are fighting the powerful teachers' organizations tooth and nail to require public school teachers to have a standard level of competence, at least in the subjects they propose to teach. Certification tests flunk large numbers of unionized teachers, which is why the teachers' unions oppose them so aggressively.
Even the best-laid plans to improve teacher quality are being frustrated by educationists who resist the imposition of intellectual standards whatsoever for teachers. In Massachusetts, for example, Chancellor John Silver of Boston University, a conservative Democrat, has witnessed the failure of the state's public schools to educate even some of its best students. He has said, "The system of institutions preparing persons to become public school teachers is an utter failure and badly in need of radical reform or being shut down."
Rather than watch this tragedy of unfulfilled potential unfold year after year, Silver agreed to head up the state's Board of Education. Under his leadership, the board began to take some steps to improve the quality of its teachers. For one, they offered a $20,000 bonus to outstanding teachers from other states who would move to Massachusetts to teach. For another, Massachusetts recently instituted a policy requiring teachers in the public school system to take a competency exam. That spelled trouble from the unions.
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The teachers' unions fought hard against the test, apparently, from their standpoint, for good reason. Even the most cynical observer of public education in the state could not have predicted the dismal test results. Fifty-nine percent of the state's future teachers flunked the competency test. Apparently, they knew the rudiments of teaching, but not much else--least of all the subjects they were planning to teach. They found the math too tough, or flunked the sections on English grammar. Their general view seemed to be that you don't need to know a subject to motivate others to learn it. Dead wrong! Imagine a scenario in which a young student preparing for college asks her public school teacher to explain the difference between, say, essential and nonessential clauses and phrases in sentence construction and punctuation, and being told to "look it up in your text." These same teachers, however, are more than happy to liberally dispense such expressions to promote self-esteem as "Feel good about yourself" or "Be the best you can be."
This isn't as bad as it gets, either. Massachusetts decided to lower the bar in competency test standards to allow 260 of the 1,250 who flunked the test to become teachers anyway. Fortunately, the citizens of Massachusetts had the good sense to be outraged. They created enough public pressure to keep those who flunked--all of them--out of the classroom and ousted the Commissioner of Education, caught trying to move the goal post to fill the need for teachers.
The good new is there is some public accountability in Massachusetts, the reelection of Senator Ted Kennedy notwithstanding. The bad news is public schools in the state remain a breeding ground for academic failure.
Conditions in public education won't change, in Massachusetts or elsewhere in the nation, until we begin to insist on high academic standards for teachers and academic excellence for all students. The dumbing down of American public school education--in teacher training, textbooks, course requirements and grades, and graduation standards--are a national disgrace and will continue to head downhill until the country resets its course in public school education.
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